Reinke Faces Life

Arghhh!

Main connect down, vwbb not working, sigh

Nope. Doesn't / Didn't work. Reboot either.

So being the inveterate finger poker! I went it to task manager and nuke everything in sight to do with wamp5, apache, or sql.

Rebooted and it's back.

Don't know why, but it was always working, just zero icon in the tray.

Hmmmm….????
—–Original Message—–
From: CyberSpatium [mailto:cyberspatium@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, April 02, 2006 11:09 AM
Subject: Re: WAMP5 ICON gone from tray [2:5423:5446]

This message was sent from: WAMP5 English.
<http://www.wampserver.com/phorum/read.php?f=2&i=5446&t=5423>
—————————————————————-

click on:

Start Button -> All Programs -> WampServer -> Start Wampserver

This will now show the icon in the tray.

Interesting for sure. It's up and running. I've message my Luddite to test it. It does seem to error occasionally, send a report to msft, and keep on going. It doens't lose any data.

I still haven't figured out how to back it up.

I still don't know what I am going to do with it.

But, I'm learning!

Well when PERSPECTIVE wouldn't run, which was probably my fault, I moved on to another wiki. inspired by http://www.lifehacker.com/software/wikipedia/geek-to-live-set-up-your-personal-wikipedia-163707.php I gave mediawiki, the thing that powers wikopedia, a try.

Worked like a charm; well maybe a cracked charm. I had some trouble getting the WAMP5 to install. Then, I had some trouble getting apache to come up. I iterated thru that drill a few times. With reboots to ensure that wxp was clean. AND, just as I was about to give up. POOF! Everything started to work. Shazam.

I haven't rebooted since I got it working but that shouldn't casue anything to fail? Right!

I actually have tested it across my home lan and it seems to work. I've got a DUH, a type3, and a type4 so far, but nothing I can't live with.

I ported all my stuff over from Perspective last night.

One observation is that I don't have a backup … yet. AND, the underlying data store is not xml or html or text. Have to think about that.

You can't see my wiki because it's firewalled. Kinda defeats the purpose of wikiing. But when I feel confident enough, I'll go up on vwbbie and expose it to the net for a short time. Then my luddite friend can test it for me. It's neat technology.

Next I want to put it on my machine at work. That should cause a stir.

{Begin Quote}

What do you think? Should computer security be mandatory? Just for businesses, or for everybody? How should it be enforced: technologically forced on us, enforced by ISPs, or enforced by the government? Should repeat offenders be banned from the Internet? Do you want security mechanisms such as firewalls and anti-virus included in the operating system? If so, should you be able to disable it if you want? Should software security patches be mandatory, and should your software stop working if they aren't applied? Let us know what you think at feedback@wxpnews.com.

{End Quote}

Intelligent Designer forbid! Have you seen where the "laws" have gotten us? Are we looking at a different country?

Law doesn't DO squat. The only one, who obeys laws, are the law abiding. Last I looked, they were not the problem. AND, every time the government makes a law, it's a joke. Heard of the "Law of Unintended Consequences", like the "Law of Gravity", it's a real law. It operates regardless of anyone's intention.

Let's examine our "computer security" problems.

Identity theft? Caused by the government. Yup, remember that social security number that would never ever be used as a universal identifier. Fooled ya! It is. Without the social security number, identity theft would be unknown. Let's nuke the ssn, and the ponzi scheme called social security "insurance".

Spam, phishing, and unknown bad guys doing bad things on the net. Hmm, who designed IPv4 as an unautheticated protocol? Yup, came out of government funded research. Wide spread because it was free and the government subsidized it. Ever compare IBM's SNA, a competing protocol at about the same time? It only allowed known devices to join the network. And, you could string them together; each network responsible for its members. IPv6 would fully triple A the network, but there is no incentive to move to it.

Insecure computing platforms? Guess there isn't a penalty for software that is flawed. Let's see the government buys lots of software. It could say that they were only going to buy Open Source Software where I can see the security. Poof, there goes the market. Oh, but no political contributions from the Closed Source Software vendors. Government says all voting machines must be open source, produce a paper ballot that the voter can check, and "cast" as their vote. No contributions from Diebold or rigged elections. They could say that all data storage has to be in an open format; we saw how well that idea worked in Taxachussetts.

The government doesn't have to pass a law. They can use their economic power to mold the marketplace. They can open the courts to "injured" "consumers". Cut out this sham of "licensing". They can do lots of things without "laws".

One criticism of Sarbox is all they did was make consultants rich. What makes you think that this would be any different?

No leave the internet alone. Leave the vendors to duke it out. Competition, free of laws, will improve everything. It's the invisible hand of the marketplace, enforcing a discipline that is swift and hard. Only when the government comes in does trouble begin.

IMHO

http://langa.com

http://www.puppylinux.com/

He recommends it as a small distribution; just had to try it.

Found out that I never put the iso burner back on lugable. Argh.

Afte rI rebuilt lug-able, I reinstalled GTalk, the 3/22 download, and back comes my wsod. When I task switch to gtalk, bang, the screen goes white and eventually reboots. So it’s somehtign with gtalk. I reported it. (Lotta good that will do.) As I did last time, I have very low expectations.

http://goffice.com

No here’s an interesting wrinkle exposed by some one writing about Writely. I tried writely but didn’t see any particualr value.

Here’s one with a wrinkle! Free outbound fax and free usmail of your document. It has to be only for the trial period becasue they’d go broke.

You might want to try it, on the theory, that it might be useful in a pinch AND you can use it as an example of how knowledgeable you are. OR, you might even beable to work it into your USP or the particular UVP you are trying to advance.

FWIW (for what it is worth),

YMMV (your mileage may vary),

FJohn

The Big Turkey

I have this wiki running locally. I even addressed it from my corporate desktop. BUT it barffed when I tried to sandbox from accross the internet. DOn’t have time to play too much but sent out a call to my ace luddite to test it form his end. Nervous about being up without shields. Hmm, maybe the experts are wrong about the risks.

I currently use OOO as a backup to Microsoft Office 2003. I acquired my current MSFT from their company store as a corporate customer. So I didn’t pay full price. I am knowledge executive  in technology so my employer has deployed it on my notebook desktop for me to use. Personally, I have been using Microsoft stuff since an employer shifted from wordperfect eons ago. So I have a lot of time “invested” in microsoft stuff. I am not happy. I am probably going to break with the cycle of never ending upgrades with Vista. I am planning to “stay behind”. I am dipping my toes in the current world of linux distributions. (I am fluent in unix and solaris for my work.) It’s going to be painful and ugly. But, I think MSFT has outlived its usefulness. Recently, I had some winrot on my personal laptop. It was agonizing. McAfee wouldn’t install or deinstall and kept mucking up the ip stack. Only an os reinstall eliminated it. And the associated reinstalls were painful. During the winrot episode, Word2003 would open and close but not save a document. Open Office Writer worked like a charm to allow me to complete my ezine. Not without some format breakage, and not without some relearning of common Office functions, (I think there were a few things I never was able to do. But, I worked around the problems.) So my plan is to stay behind on the next upgrade cycle (Msft makkes you buy new intel hardware; intel invents more powerful hardware for msft to design for; we pay and pay and pay). OOO is a key tactic in that strategic decision.

http://www.ncaasports.com/mmod/welcome

Interesting for free. I don’t know that I’d pay a lot for it. The picture quality is “scratchy” and it is small.

Or you’ll lose something. I’m not so sure that I’ll be able to recover the minor ones. The topical ones that I created with gmail for a very specific purpose.

I use the inbox with a rule to put each email address in it’s own folder. When reinitializing outlook, it sucks … sucks all the old messages down to the inbox. I wait to energize that rule to move until I have had time to determine the date I already have and delete the prior. Then I energize the rule, and all is back to normal. I’ve used that trick before.

Also, when setting up lookout for gmal account, remember it has by design huge stores of messages. Use the received after now option and read the intermedairies online. If you need a local copy forward it to yourself.

Arghhhhh!

… … since it is my intention to go to Linux as opposed to Vista, perhaps I should go now?

What are the implications? Hmmmm. Since it is a giant pia to recover to windows, maybe I should just forget it. Hmmm?

… … when my favorite podcast went from 1 hour files to 3 hour files, I had t do something. My pos mp3 player doesn’t pick up from where it left off but from the beginning of the file. Argh!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3splt-gtk

http://mp3splt.sourceforge.net/mp3splt_page/home.php

It’s not a perfect solution. You have to do stuff! And, compensate for the user interface deficiency. But it works.

Like most Open SOurce Software, it works. It’s free. And, it is “good enough”. 

http://reinkefj.googlepages.com/home

Move over Microsoft’s Office Live beta, and its free page-hosting option, that requires your credit card! (Why do I keeping hearing the line for the Wizard of Oz, “I’ll get you my dear, and your little dog too!”?) Google just offered an easy-to-use web page creator, called logically Google Page Creator, “beta” (whatever that means, since their beta is more stable than some allegedly production quality stuff I run, and 100 MB of storage space.  

Note it’s temporarily overwhelmed. But, it’s a winner!

http://pages.google.com

“Thank you for your interest in Google Page Creator! Google Page Creator has experienced extremely strong demand, and, as a result, we have temporarily limited the number of new signups as we increase capacity. In the meantime, please submit your email address and we will notify you as soon as we are ready to add new accounts. Thank you for your patience.” 

I can see a lotta uses for it.

It would be useful to inventory the “stuff” that I use. I’d like to have a backup of the distribution. My thought is that this summer I’d liek to rebuild my luggable.

http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/thinkCSpy/index.htm 

How to Think Like a Computer Scientist
Learning with Python
by Allen B. Downey, Jeffrey Elkner and Chris Meyers

http://www.python.org/download/

A (free) Python interpreter